All of them were the same, too—sweating, pale, panicked, about to be sick. Only natural, I assumed, since thisreallydidn’t look like it would have a good ending for us so far, so of course they were stressed out.
Exceptme.Not entirely sure why. Not because of them, of course, but didn’t I care about what happened tome?
Not so much, apparently. Not nearly as much as I’d have thought.
Cook’s eyes widened. “That means if we break the Seventh?—”
“It’ll shove the ending into the Eighth Hour,” Levana finished.
We paused, looked around.
“I feel like we’re thinking about this wrong,” Silas muttered. “If we break the Sixth, it will most likely activate the Ninth.”
“Can’t they just let us break the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth, too?!” Mimi said. “C’mon—we’re going to die here if we don’t break them!”
She, too, knew that shouting at the darkness over our heads wasn’t going to actually get us an answer—or a free pass out of this trial, but she still did it with all her strength.
“We’re trying tostopthe sequences,” I said, fighting back the headache that was developing in my temples as I tried to wringmy mind for ideas. “What if we don’t?”
“Yes,” Levana whispered. “What if we just stop them from finishing?”
“But how?” asked Cook. “All three of them are lighting up—how?”
As if on cue, the First Hour lit up again, and the melody started once more.
Mimi screamed in frustration. The rest of us were paralyzed in place, waiting, watching, listening. This time, though, I focused more on the others than myself. While the notes played, I thought about whattheywere thinking, how terrifiedtheywere, howtheywere just waiting to die—and it helped. My muscles weren’t as clenched and my heart didn’t beat as fast.
Then the Seventh Hour lit up andfedthe thirteenth more and more timesand, while the rest of us gritted our teeth and waited for it to be over.
It was. The Eighth Hour lit up, and the ninth—but there was no more silence in the room. Instead the Thirteenth Hour continued to hum lowly, the brown light coming from inside it just barely there.
It was indeed coming to life.
I swallowed hard. “If we break one, it completes the sequence through the other. There’s no winning here—it will just complete itself one way or the other.”
“Unless…” Silas said, eyes closed, his hand raised up as if he were testing the temperature in the air. “Unless we don’t break justone.”
“What do you mean?” asked Levana.
“We only have two more left to break,” March said.
Silas looked at the remaining hourglasses, then back at them. “We only have two left.”
“This clock isn’t linear,” Cook said.
“Exactly—it’s self-correcting! There’s no way to know the right answer,” said Levana, unshed tears glistening in her eyes.
“Just hear me out,” said Silas. “Breaking earlier hours makes it worse. I think this works like any Timekeeper Clock infused with magic. All systems are designed the same way—when damaged, they try to reroute.”
“Yes—when we broke the obvious choices, the system looked for the closest intact hour,” Levana said.
“Except…” Cook’s voice trailed off for a moment as he looked ahead at nothing, then he said, “The closest intact hour thatbelongs to the same sequence.”
Silence for a tick.
Then Levanascreamedat the top of her lungs, and she jumped and kissed Cook’s cheek.
Suddenly all the blood in his body went to his face.
